Saturday, October 3, 2015

Layoffs, as painful as they are, should fall on the least-effective teachers when layoffs are absolutely unavoidable.

—Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, 22 March 2011

Most teacher
layoffs during the Great Recession were implemented following
inverse-seniority policies. This paper examines the implementation
of a discretionary layoff policy in Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools.
Administrators did not uniformly lay off the most or least senior
teachers but instead selected teachers who were previously retired,
late-hired, unlicensed, low-performing, or nontenured.

The author of the paper estimates the differential effects of teacher layoffs on student
achievement based on teacher seniority and effectiveness. Mathematics
achievement in grades that lost an effective teacher, as measured by
principal evaluations or value-added scores, decreased 0.05 to 0.11
standard deviations more than in grades that lost an ineffective
teacher. In contrast, teacher seniority has limited predictive power on
the effects of layoffs. Simulation analyses show that the district
selected teachers who were, on average, less effective than those
teachers identified under an inverse-seniority policy.